Bing also makes it very easy to find the full names of most “private” profiles and 3rd degree connections (for those using LinkedIn with a free account). In many cases, all you need to do is copy and paste the “headline” from the LinkedIn profile in question into Bing as a phrase in quotes to get the public profile you’re looking for.

For example:

Taking that headline and searching for it as a phrase in quotation marks on Bing, you will reveal the person’s public profile and full name. Notice that I didn’t have to add site:linkedin.com. If you encounter a profile with a very common/generic headline phrase, such as “Systems Engineer at IBM,” you may not get so lucky.

In cases such as those, all you need to do is use a unique combination of phrases/terms from the profile – any combination that is likely to isolate the specific LinkedIn profile you’re targeting. I find that using the headline, an exact current and/or previous title phrase, and an educational institution works well when the headline alone is very non-specific.

If you click on any of the cached results, you can see how Bing happily returned results of people who have the phrase “engineer at Google” in their current title field:

Bing’s support of configurable proximity search can also be very useful when searching for resumes on the Internet. Let’s say you wanted to find people who have had a specific responsibility, such as configuring juniper routers.

You could run a search like this: (inurl:resume OR intitle:resume) configuring near:5 juniper juniper near:5 routers

And see results like this:

Of course, there are many different ways to run that search – I only wanted to demonstrate the power of being able to control how close search terms are to each other, especially when targeting responsibilities, typically stated in verb/noun combinations. This allows you to perform semantic search at the sentence level.

X-Ray Searching Twitter

With Bing’s NEAR:x functionality, it is remarkably simple to X-Ray Twitter and target people in specific locations who mention specific titles and/or skill terms in their bios.

For example, let’s say you wanted to find Twitter profiles of user experience professionals who live in the New York area. You could run a search like this on Bing:

Of course, if you use Firefox, you could simply click here to accomplish the same thing:

If you use Internet Explorer, after adding &format=rss and hitting “Enter,” you can add the feed to your Favorites or subscribe to the resulting feed:

Do you think you might have a use for RSS feeds generated from LinkedIn X-Ray searches?

:-)

Final Thoughts

I still use Google – old habits die hard, and it’s a good search engine. Even if you are an avid fan and user of Google, Bing cannot be ignored by sourcers and recruiters. It would be folly to not exploit Bing’s many advantages that can be leveraged specifically for talent discovery and identification.

One of my next posts will be a proximity search shootout between Bing and Google, now that I’ve become aware that Google also supports configurable proximity (thanks Kelly!). I will also be exposing some of the limitations of Bing search, including search string length and not properly processing OR statements in certain search scenarios.